. (spacecowboys) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-11-10 23:30:00 |
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Entry tags: | catwoman |
Who: Wren
What: Narrative
Where: Home → Church
When: After these conversations
Warnings/Rating: Disturbing sexual imagery
She turned off the phone and stared at the shadow she cast upon the carpet. Sitting, sitting, still in the living room chair, and the sun that filtered through the front window hit her at an angle. Feet and belly, and she had no features in that cast shadow, and she felt like youth. Once, she'd been like that. She'd had no features that were not painted upon her by others. Broad strokes by some. Tiny, meticulous brushwork by others. Layers of other peoples' desires, and she'd been covered in paint by the time she turned thirteen. She didn't expect anyone to understand. Adages and idioms and sayings that belonged to old wives at tables with bread to knead and well-fed children at their knees. She didn't expect anyone to understand. The shadow grew.
And yet she did not move.
Shhhh, still and quiet, and she knew that lesson too. She had learned it early one morning after toddling into her maman's closet to play. She loved closets, even then. The safety of tiny walls in tiny spaces. Nothing like the big bad world and its monsters. Shhhhh, and she peeked between the slats and watched the bed creak, but she didn't make a sound. She knew better, even before she knew anything at all. She'd never forgotten. The shadow grew.
She didn't expect anyone to understand. Who could? Flopped on her belly on maman's soft bed, the corset strings pulled tight beneath her fingers when maman asked. The music that played was French, something false and bright that sounded like sex, and it felt good then, when she was very small. It felt like the culmination of stories about princes and princesses, and she didn't understand yet. Not until eight. By eight, she understood. But she didn't expect anyone else to. Job, they said, and no one understood that it wasn't. Jobs were things for adults. Suits you put on when you walked out the door, and the way you behaved with people that weren't exactly friends. Jobs, but it wasn't a job. It had never been. It wasn't a suit; it was skin. The shadow did not grow.
The shadow did not grow, because she was not there to cast it. Stillness had always been hard. It was harder on hot and sticky afternoons in the Keys, before the customers came, when the sound of laughter carried on the sea breeze from the school down the road. School, and she'd dreamt of books and pencils the way other children dreamt of weekends. Her shoes were worn now, the ballerina flats long since ruined for any true ballerina. The sidewalk was hot beneath worn soles, the desert sun unforgiving, even in Fall. She walked, and the white linen dress she wore stopped at the knee and clung to her belly like it would rip at the seams if she breathed too deeply. There was no sun now, and there was no shadow, and there was only the distant sound of life. Life, over there, where the normal people played.
Oui and non, and they didn't understand that those words didn't exist. There was no feeling by five. By five, it was stand pretty, and she did. By eight, it was sit here, and she did. By thirteen she couldn't feel five, and she couldn't feel eight. They were all blank pages, memories that didn't come with strings of emotion attached. Other people, she'd thought, felt. But it was distant, distant, like the boats off the shore, the ones that faded out of sight and could never be reached. By thirteen, it was like watching someone else. Oui and non, and she thought maybe other girls had those words, but they hadn't been in her dictionary, and she had never mourned them. She had never known them.
She hadn't been back to the church since Thierry, since Silver.
Quiet and still, and no one sang to God. The smell of incense lingered, and she thought of her maman waving a stick of it in the living room of the house, the smoke rising to kiss the ceiling as it begged to be released. But there was no going, and she thought maybe she'd told the ceiling that once when she was very young. But here it was different. Here the incense didn't mingle with salt and sweat and sin.
She slid into the pew, the wood squeaking against the skin behind her knees. She crossed her legs at the ankle, and the worn ballerina shoes slid along the floor beneath her feet, back and forth. She picked up the hymnal with graceful fingers, and little good that grace had done her in a life devoid of grace. She turned the crumbled and thin pages, familiar names and Mary Magdalene, her maman had said, was like them; it hadn't been any consolation. Etiquette and piano lessons and dancing and which fork to use, and that was how to become a mistress, and that was how to make money. And she'd been eleven, and she hadn't understood why having a pimp was bad, and why loving was bad, and why fairy tales were lies and once upon a time was a trick. She hadn't understood, because she was numb by then. Numb, and she hadn't even realized when it happened. She'd told her maman, and her maman had smiled and touched her cheek and made her favorite supper.
By thirteen, she was nothing, and that's what no one understood. By thirteen, tangled limbs were like drinking water, like walking down the street, like breathing. Dead siblings burnt to a crisp and a dead père that had never loved, and that didn't bother either. It was like the feel of sheets on her legs at night, and it was like the moisture on skin in summer. It was nothing, and no one understood. Even now, no one understood. She needed to apologize, because somewhere she'd started wanting, and she'd been hiding that away like she'd hidden in closets once. But it was there now, and she couldn't erase it, and she couldn't pretend. She ran her fingers over her belly, the hymnal discarded at her hip, and she hummed a French tune that had nothing to do with Jesus. Low at her back, ache lived, but she ignored it.
She could remember dead faces, and she could remember men bent over her. She could remember, and yet no regret chased along her spine to bring her shivers. No, that ache was all belly and baby and nothing like good.
Outside, dark became darker and darker yet.